Employability agenda isn’t working

You are the authority in that classroom and the students will take your lead, they will pick up subtle feelings from you and they will react to them. You have a well-paid position in society and you do not need to take CV writing as seriously as a large proportion of your students will over the coming years; however I believe your negative attitude will lead them to believe that they do not need to take these skills seriously either. This year for the first time your graduates will be asked how employable they feel six months after graduation. If your graduates in particular are below your institution's average then I would ask a serious question about why they are leaving your course feeling that they haven't got the skills of their peers in other areas. If however they feel fantastically employable then you can continue to maintain that someone else is responsible for providing those foundations that will set them up for the rest of their lives.

I'm wondering whether the students would have answered differently if the author's attitude to the seminar material had been supportive? And who said that CVs had to be used purely for the purpose of entering the rat race? Putting together a CV early on in a degree can help a student reflect on what choices they would like to make. It can also lead them to sources of information about their favoured choices and to planning activities to undertake during their period of study that will be beneficial in that. A focus on weaknesses is harsh, I agree, but since at some point money will need to be earned in order to live, looking at the gap between skills/experiences now and what will be needed in your path of choice seems wise. Of course, as a careers professional I would say all that, wouldn't I.....

@ Jenny Benham CV writing may well be best delivered via careers service professionals. Nevertheless, there is a lot more to employability than CV writing. Ideally, these skills are embedded within the curriculum and involve meaningful, subject-based tasks. In Geography, for example, this might involve getting students to participate in a mock planning enquiry or perhaps submit a consultancy report for assessment (rather than an essay). Such tasks, trivial as they may seem in themselves, are about (i) applying subject knowledge; and (ii) employability.

Just to give my own biases, I'm a university careers adviser and also have a PhD in English literature. I've never worked as an academic, but I did teach undergraduates during and after my PhD. >> Inviting students to present their CVs in front of each other forced them to think of themselves as competitors - and even, for all but one of them, as “losers”. I think that's a very strange way to look at that exercise. Are all presentations competitive, with winners and losers? If students do a presentation on a History topic, or students on a creative course present a project and get feedback from a group, is that a competitive exercise? It seems much less competitive to me than submitting essays which are marked on a purely numeric scale and being given a degree classification based on those scales! What I would be expecting to see in this exercise would be students learning to differentiate themselves, and to give each other positive and constructive feedback. The fact that the CV exercise focussed on "weaknesses" and not also on "strengths" is a very valid criticism - students and graduates definitely have at least as much difficulty identifying their strengths as they do identifying their weaknesses! I'd also hope to see them sharing knowledge about their different careers ambitions, eg. Student A saying they're planning to go into a law conversion course, and Student B is amazed to discover that law is an option and gets all excited by the possibility. With History and English students, you have to be quite careful that they don't start reinforcing the idea that there are no jobs and it's all pointless, or that it's selling out if you want to apply for a graduate scheme, which can be a pretty depressing and unhelpful narrative for those that do want to go on in that direction, but as with any other kind of seminar, they've got lots to learn from each other. However, as a university careers adviser for at least the next three weeks, I'm very happy to see recognition that we have specialist knowledge in this area!